Pan number misused by bogus firms: 27-year-old learns he is ‘director’ of 13 firms

Pan number misused by bogus firms: 27-year-old learns he is ‘director’ of 13 firms

Anuj Kumar Srivastav works as a sales executive with a pharma company, earns Rs 25,000 a month, lives at a rented accommodation in east Delhi’s Laxmi Nagar area and drives a WagonR. Some months ago, the 27-year-old came to know that he was also a director of 13 companies, and had engaged in transactions worth over Rs 20 crore in the months before — one deal was by a Hong Kong-based company totalling Rs 61 lakh.

The problem: Srivastav said he came to know about his “business empire” for the first time from a notice issued by the Income Tax department in January.

Alarmed, he lodged a complaint with Delhi Police and the Enforcement Directorate in February, stating that his PAN number had been used without his knowledge by “bogus companies to engage in large scale dealings with companies abroad”.

It was only on July 31 that he finally got what he wanted, when a Delhi court ordered the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Delhi Police to act on the complaint and furnish a detailed report on September 1. He now hopes that the I-T department will rectify the “mistake”.

In his order, Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) Sumedh Kumar Sethi said, “Cases involving cheating and breach of trust for amount more than Rs 2 crore are to be dealt with by the EOW… Copy of the order be sent to SHO, EOW.”

“My friends call me a tycoon… Imagine, I was not even able to get a personal loan of Rs 5 lakh as all the banks rejected my loan application after looking at my original Income Tax Return form,” he said, on a lighter note.

Hailing from Buxar in Bihar, Srivastav said that when he first got the I-T notice in January, he didn’t take it seriously. “I just ignored the first three notices of the I-T department in January. I thought they have mistakenly sent these notices where they had written that my PAN card was used to carry out a transaction on April 23, 2015, wherein Rs 61.37 lakh was allegedly remitted from one Maxkart Impex company to Dynamic Telecon Trading Ltd situated at Bright Way Tower in Mong Kok Road,” he said.

“I got a call from an IT official who informed me that the transaction was carried forward from Janakpuri branch of a national bank. The payment was made allegedly in lieu of import of software where I was made as a proprietor of Maxkart Impex company,” said Srivastav.

Days after receiving the call, he went to the bank along with a CA. “The bank manager showed the photocopy of my voter ID card, PAN card and my photo, but the signature did not match. Then, I approached a lawyer and filed a complaint with Delhi Police and the ED, but no action was taken,” he said.

Srivastav said while he was struggling to register a complaint, he found that a “heavy amount” was deducted on his Income Tax form and he again tried to approach the investigating agency. “With the help of my CA, I found out that I had been made director of around 13 companies and my PAN card was used to create bogus accounts from which transactions of Rs 20 crore were carried out in the last seven months,” he said.

“Initially, we forwarded the matter to Income Tax as we thought that the matter pertains to them. But now the court has directed us to investigate the matter,” a senior officer of EOW said.